Search form

Search form

Research shows that to compete in today's global market, small and midsized businesses will need to enhance their cultural awareness and hire more multilingual employees. Such employees can help businesses interact more professionally with international customers. "The ability to work across cultures is no longer a nice-to-have skill set for elite executives; every year it becomes more essential to finding any job at all," international careers expert and author Stacie Berdan said.

Related Summaries

Only a small percentage of creative directors in the advertising industry are women, but there have been signs of change, Geri Stengel writes. "Feminine skills and competencies, such as empathy, flexibility, openness and collaboration are coming to the fore, not just as nice-to-haves but as business imperatives," she writes.

Raising children who are culturally competent begins, in part, with globally competent teachers, writes international careers expert and author Stacie Nevadomski Berdan. In this blog post, she shines a light on some of the attributes of globally competent teachers and offers a variety of resources to help expand teachers' global competency. "Teachers with global perspectives can help foster increased cultural understanding and support more young people to think, act and live as global citizens," she writes.

While some states have considered allowing high school students to use computer programming course credits to meet foreign language requirements for graduation, some educators say a computer coding language and a foreign language are not the same and that the two should remain separate, write international careers expert Stacie Nevadomski Berdan and Marty Abbott, executive director for ACTFL. They say foreign language learning encourages critical thinking and understanding of cultures, among other things, and that allowing students to use computer science credits could hurt their chances of getting into colleges that require foreign language study.

Grass roots efforts by schools, families and communities can help create the next generation of global citizens, Stacie Nevadomski Berdan, an international careers expert and author, writes in this blog post. She calls for schools to infuse global learning across the K-12 curriculum. "We need global education, or more accurately, education infused with global learning, to empower youth by providing them with the knowledge, skills and awareness necessary to become responsible global citizens," she writes.

Global education advocate Stacie Nevadomski Berdan writes that parents and students ought to consider how well an institution teaches languages while making a college choice. Business leaders and government officials look at language proficiency as a critical need for their employees. Berdan suggests checking each college's language offerings, the language faculty's qualifications and background as well as study abroad opportunities.